1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an electronic album creating apparatus, an electronic album editing apparatus, an information processing system, an electronic album creating method, and a storage medium storing program capable of making a multimedia object forming album data on the electronic album creating apparatus editable for the electronic album editing apparatus through a network.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, with the development of communication systems and information communication technologies, a variety of information providing services that make use of the Internet have been developed. With information providing services that make use of the Internet, it is possible to provide information not only by text but also so-called multimedia information, which includes images and sound as well. It is against this background that the provision and mail-order sale of services linked to multimedia information through the Internet has now become commonplace, and the number of users of these services has increased as well.
In addition, with the spread of digital cameras and the like, services by which prints of images sensed using a digital camera can be ordered over the Internet have begun to take hold as well. Among such services, although there are some that merely print digital image data as is, others retouch the image data, or use the image data as material and edit it to make new album data. As an example of the former, there is printing of image data sensed using a digital camera onto photographic paper. As an example of the latter, printing and binding of albums using the image data is typical.
As one method of editing for the purpose of creating new album data, in an application on a client side terminal apparatus of a client that is connected to a network there can be instruction of the disposition of objects such as images, character sequences, drawings and the like, as well as the type and size of the font used to display the characters. Then, the edited data completed at the application on the client side terminal apparatus is uploaded to an information processing apparatus server over a network, with printing carried out on the server side (see, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2006-072850).
If the edited data is data of a type that multiple people wish to have, for example a graduation album or the like, then printing may be ordered as follows: Specifically, people other than the original editor can only order the same edited data that the original editor created. This edited data is not always what people other than the original editor want, and consequently, there is a desire for people other than the original editor to be able to further edit such edited data as they wish.
However, to make it possible for all people to download edited data created by the original editor and edit it using an application on the client side means that there is a possibility that the data will be edited beyond the intent of the original editor, which is not appropriate. In addition, there is the opportunity for people other than the original editor to directly touch the data, leading to the problem of tampering.
It should be noted that with data creation other than that targeted for printing as described above, for example with the display of a greeting card as a web page and the sending of that URL as an e-mail to a third party, in the creation of the data the same problems arise.